The best software to manage your music collection on Windows

In the early 2000s, we witnessed the expansion of digital music. The MP3 file format has notably changed the way this culture is consumed, allowing the storage of a large amount of information on the same medium. At that time, Windows Media Player and Winamp software were often the most widely used. Today, users are turning more to streaming services. These services do not spend any storage space and offer intelligent playback modes that adapt to your preferences. What’s more, they automatically suggest new features that may appeal to you.

Software for organizing your music library may be useful to you. You may have kept a personal collection of digital music for offline access. Or perhaps, you have a few nuggets not found on streaming services. Here is a selection of our favorite media players to manage your digital albums.

MusicBee – the most customizable music player

MusicBee is a free and independent audio player released in 2008 and updated regularly. When initializing, it is necessary to specify the music storage directory, which it scans. Its automatic tag function and pocket manager allow you to reorganize a disordered music library efficiently.

MusicBee’s interface is clean, pleasant, and leaves plenty of room for customization. All displayed panels can be rearranged according to your preferences, and many skins can change the overall appearance of the player. It allows you to add new tabs to quickly access audiobooks, podcasts, radios and played file history. In the “In progress” page, MusicBee offers an interesting visualization consisting of a biography (in English), photos of the artist in the background, and a spectrogram. When it comes to original displays adapted to all situations, it also offers a compact player, a mini player and a cinema mode.

MediaMonkey 4 – the most feature-rich player

MediaMonkey organizes your music library according to your criteria, with precision. It provides an option to automatically fill in missing tags from the Web and file names. It can create smart playlists based on custom filters: the last added tracks not played, classical music rated 4 stars or more or the most recently played tracks.

MediaMonkey has an audio CD extraction module, a multi-format converter and can even burn discs or synchronize mobile devices. It supports many formats. For music, we find MP3, AAC, OGG, WMA and FLAC files, and video, AVI, MP4, and WMV files.

Groove Music – Microsoft’s music player for Windows 10

Upon installation, the Windows 10 operating system comes with multimedia tools such as Movies and TV, Groove Music and the veteran Windows Media Player. Although the latter is ideally suited to managing an audio library, we have chosen to present Groove Musique, which is the software designed by Microsoft for Windows 10. By default, the system is configured to play music with this program.

The player’s interface is modern; it offers to display all the songs or to sort the titles by artist or album. Media information (cover and metadata) can be retrieved and updated automatically if you enable the corresponding option in the software settings menu. Groove Music will present your album collection graphically and elegantly.

Clementine – a good open-source player

Clementine is a free open source music manager and player. Its interface is less clear than Groove Musique’s, but this software offers a lot of options. It operates on the principle of a playlist, which grows as the user selects tracks, artists and albums.

Clementine is thinking of users who prefer to navigate through their folder tree to select files manually, by integrating an explorer directly into the software window. The pocket manager analyzes the files to identify missing illustrations and automatically downloads them. It is optimized to handle the “Diverse Artists” who sometimes disorganize music collections.